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Shall we give it as a free software?

Hi there,
I have completed about 50% of myspace.com style php script. Its very scalable. I startd this project with an aim of selling it. While I was developing it, I came across many sites and new concepts.

My questions is:

1. Shall I sell it (encrypted format)
2. Shall I sell it (unencrypted format with a higher price)
3. Shall I give it away free (in encrypted form) to form a community of users (like articledashboard.com)

There's definitely advantages of offering it for free, but I think if you do, it has to be fully open source. That way you stand to build a much larger community as developers can contribute to the project, they can also fully hack and customise and you'll have support taken care of by all your forum community. You then just need to work out an 'angle' on how you can make money from the project - sell ad space, sell yourself (developer services), sell preminum support, sell custom add-ons, sell other scripts, etc.

I'm not sure if you want this to turn into a debate about encryption, but I fail to see the reasoning behind offering a unencrypted version for a higher price, not if encryption is being used to halt piracy - thieves will still pay the higher price if they think they can still benefit from the source code an it only takes one person to buy the unencrypted version and start distributing it on P2P networks.

You could always incorporate a licensing encyption in which one key file is encrypted and this is contains some major functions and licensing info. But again, the word 'encryption' is always going to turn away a large number of potential users.